Oil Spills, Earth Day, & Beauty

Since we have talked a lot about ways
humans hurt the Earth in our habitat studies (deforestation, hunting, global
warming, etc.), we have spent all week learning about ways to care for our
Earth. We have read Miss
Fox’s Class Goes Green, Trashy
Town, Oil

Spill, Wump
World, and several other fun books. Then, as a culminating activity and a
way to brighten our walls, we are working on an Earth
Day Craftivity that Preschool Crafts for Kids highlighted. So, all I did was add the writing papers and it’s perfect! You can grab the directions for the craft portion from their website here! We are finishing up our
writing activities tomorrow, so I will have pictures to share of our new display
next week! In the mean time, click on any of the pictures or here
to grab the writing papers for free!

After reading, Oil
Spill by Melvin Berger and Paul Mirocha, we put our Earth clean-up skills
to action and attempted different methods of restoration – pads (paper towels),
booms (yarn), and chemicals (Dawn dish washing soap). In table groups, we
placed a plastic container of water that represented the ocean. Then, motor oil
was added to the water and students illustrated what happened on their learning
logs. From that point on, every group member had a responsibility (implementing
a specific clean-up agent) and members recorded their observations about the
effectiveness of the agents after each step. At the end of the activity, it was
really neat to have the discussion, “The chemicals were great at getting rid of
the oil, but at what cost?” We then connected our experiment back to the Alaskan
Exon and BP Gulf oil spills. This is such a cool activity that my cooperating
teacher has been doing for years and perfect for some ‘real-life’ hands-on
learning!

We had TWO school-wide assemblies this
week and both of them were fantastic. The second of the week was Animal Tales –
Animals of the Night. Since we just finished up habitats, it was THE perfect
connection. Mr. John talked all about nocturnal animals and we got to meet an
African porcupine, snake, rodent (ewww), Barn owl, and a Horned Frog! Our
friends were absolutely enthralled and they got to touch a real live snake….how cool!?!? 🙂

Have you ever been to a Scholastic
Warehouse Sale???? Holey moely – talk about the Holy Grail of book bargains
(literally, I walked in and there were 1 million books!!!1). I volunteered at
my first sale in December and walked away with ALL of these books for only
$1.73. I KNOW!!! They have books for all ages and abilities. Plus, they have an
awesome ‘Build a Box’ section where any of the marked books you can fit into a
box will cost $25! Plus, every book is automatically 50% off the cover price.
So, all those $5 book order books are only $2.50…in addition to any other specials running on them! PLUS, if you register
to attend beforehand you get this awesome coupon for $10 off of $50 spent and
$25 off $100. PLUS PLUS (as if you are not already sold), you can volunteer and
receive $10 an hour in Scholastic Bucks!!! I am signed up to work 20 hours over
the course of two days in May. Obviously, you should stop reading this post
RIGHT NOW and go register on Scholastic’s website because these Warehouse Sales
are better than Christmas and birthdays and bell-pepper plants…combined!